Two, I witnessed an awkward student earlier this year stand in front of his entire middle school class and read an award-winning letter to children's author Rick Riordan praising his Percy Jackson series about a child with dyslexia who learns his disability is actually a ticket into the world of the Greek gods. "As someone with Asperger's, I am afraid to go to school almost every day," the kid said in the letter. "I have read 'The Titan's Curse' over and over again, and it gives me courage to face my classmates."

These are the kids that could be affected by the new diagnostic guidebook for defining and documenting mental disorders, the DSM-V. The biggest changes for schools are a new, all-inclusive condition called "autism spectrum disorder" that lumps Asperger's and autism together with other disintegrative developmental problems. The other new category that could impact schools is a syndrome for excessive temper tantrums, "disruptive mood dysregulation disorder."

The point of putting labels onto mental conditions is to make sure that the affected children get extra help in navigating the already-difficult obstacle course of growing up and learning the scholastic essentials for taking care of themselves. As the American Psychiatric Association was debating the changes, several practitioners expressed fears that some autistic students would lose their diagnosis and accompanying social and educational services, which could worsen their conditions. The new autism definition could result in lowered diagnosis rates of a 10 percent to 50 percent, depending on who you read. On the other hand, the new disruptive mood dysregulation disorder could result in over-diagnosis of grumpy kids.

The fundamental difficulty here is that education and psychiatric treatment are not the same thing. Meshing the clinical needs of a child with a disorder and the responsibilities of the school in educating that child is a task fraught with peril. Dr. Allen J. Frances, an outspoken critic of the diagnostic changes, summarizes the tension this way: "School services should be tied more to educational need, less to a controversial psychiatric diagnosis created for clinical (not educational) purposes."

But I can't help coming back to the brave student with Asperger's and my non-autistic son who likes to recite baseball statistics at length. Both have had their share of social problems, but they may need different supports. However we can help them, I say let's do it.

How important are the changes in the DSM-V to schools? What would a reduction in autism diagnoses do for special education, if anything? How do teachers handle kids with these disorders in the classroom? Does a diagnosis make a difference in how teachers and classmates treat them? How can psychiatrists help educators teach kids with mental disabilities? How can educators help psychiatrists?

Enter Congress.

This week the House Education and the Workforce Committee will vote on a bill that would change the current fixed rate for new federal student loans to a floating rate, in effect treating the loans like an adjustable rate mortgage in which the rate would be reset each year. There is a cap at 8.5 percent. The bill also would accomplish a long-sought Republican goal, removing lawmakers from the tuition financing process and leaving the loan terms to the market.

The House measure marks a rare point of agreement between the Obama administration and House Republicans, in which both entities are suggesting that student loans should be pegged to Treasury yields, rather than an arbitrary fixed rate. The bill will be on the House floor before Memorial Day.

Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., is also getting in on the action, proposing last week to put student loan interest rates at the current Federal Reserve rate of 0.75 percent. Her bill has almost no chance of passing, but it is creating considerable buzz among liberals and students. "Thank God, or whoever, for Elizabeth Warren," said Matthew Rothschild, the editor of The Progressive Magazine in a podcast. "Her proposal is the next best thing to free college education, but that next best thing needs to get here too."

Democrats in the House and the Senate have another student loan proposal that may have more of a chance than Warren's bill. It would also convert new student loans to adjustable rates, but the caps would be lower. Under all the proposals, students stuck with high rates would be allowed to refinance to lower rates after graduation.

Why are student loans such a big deal? What is the political attraction to the issue? Why is Warren's proposal so popular? How will students and parents react to variable-rate loans? How can policymakers justify variable interest rates to facilitate the higher education goals that everyone believes are worthwhile? What can students do to prepare for the change, should it happen?

Pierson's message is that kids need human relationships with teachers in order to learn. She also makes no bones about how difficult it is for an adult to offer that kind of interaction with every...single...child.

"Will you like all your students? Of course not! And you know your toughest kids are never absent. While you won't like them all, the key is they can never, never know it," she says. "Teachers become great actors. They come to school when they don't feel like it. ...We listen to policy that doesn't make sense, and we teach anyway."

Pierson's delivery is inspiring and funny and reminiscent of a motivational speaker. It speaks to the heart and not to the practicalities of the profession. It is a call to serve, not a linear prescription for reform. She offers passion but few concrete answers.

I suspect a little passion and some concrete answers are needed to make sure each kid we send to school can read, write, and interact appropriately. But I can't tell you how to get there. The PBS program, produced by the nonprofit ideas organization TED and New York City's public television station WNET, explores these questions with presentations from some of the country's biggest thinkers in education. They can't offer easy answers either.

A former high school English teacher I know describes teaching as a tribal activity. He says people who do it are dedicated, hardworking, smart, and sometimes smart-alecky. They like to bond with each other and grouse over the tribulations of their job--the low pay, the long hours, the horrible students and principals. They bond because they share a passion. Similar dynamics can be found in police precincts and firehouses, and to some extent, in the arts and the press. No one goes into those professions without something burning in their gut.

I love the passion. I wish I knew how to bottle it. That seems to be the biggest problem for all people involved in crafting education policy. You can't legislate a teacher-student relationship. But that doesn't mean you shouldn't try to craft rules that would foster those relationships, and it doesn't mean you can't have standards.

What are the best ways to foster honest student-teacher relationships? How do teachers mask dislike for students? How should they deal with their own problems while teaching? How important is the passion in teaching? Are there practices that can help compensate for a not-passionate teacher? How can schools encourage professional camaraderie among teachers? Do students really need to like their teachers in order to learn?

Here's how my son experiences it. He says his math teacher is "freaking out." He complains that he can't read a book after he's completed his test and must wait silently for his classmates to finish. Two years ago, he brought home a packet of news articles for his reading assignment because his teacher said his class needed practice reading non-fiction. It did not take him long to figure out that his teachers' jobs were on the line and in part depended on his performance.

Educators in the Obama administration--and many outside it--say that standardized assessments are vital to the understanding of students' progress. Assessments can identify gaps among student populations and pockets within a public school system that need review. They are invaluable for identifying under-served and disadvantaged groups of students.

But assessments also have their problems. The Education Department earlier this year released a "best practices" paper on how to prevent, detect, and investigate fraud and cheating during the tests, illustrating the pressure that they might put on school administrators. The report includes a quote from 2011 from Education Secretary Arne Duncan defending the use of the test. "The existence of cheating says nothing about the merits of testing. Instead, cheating reflects a willingness to lie at children's expense to avoid accountability--an approach I reject entirely."

Lisa Darling-Hammond, a Stanford education professor, recently published a book advocating for more equity in education opportunities. She acknowledges that assessments are an important part of school accountability, but they aren't enough to bring the low performers up to speed. Her book, "The Flat World and Education: How America's Commitment to Equity Will Determine Our Future" delves into hard-to-measure stuff like school restructuring. As Washington Post education writer Valarie Strauss notes in reviewing the book, Darling-Hammond does not offer easy answers. Everything that actually makes a difference in closing the "opportunity gap" costs money, which we all know is in short supply.

What is the best way to fit assessments into the public school system? How much weight should they have in decisions about a school's direction? What benefits do students gain from assessments? What about teachers? Or parents? What are the drawbacks of standardized testing? What changes, unrelated to testing, would make assessments more useful to public schools? What other options are available for evaluating schools and teachers?

This week, that National Assessment of Educational Progress will release new results on the economic literacy of 12th graders. The study was last conducted in 2006, before the financial collapse, and it showed while most students (79 percent) have a "basic" understanding of economics, less than half of them were "proficient" in the topic. For example, less than half of surveyed students could identify policy decisions that a government is likely to implement to stimulate economic activity during a recession.

It is to NAEP's credit that they consider this question worth asking, even though it may be more important for high school students to understand basic financial planning principles than the operations of the Federal Reserve. Either way, the results matter because the young people NAEP is evaluating are eventually going to be providing the answers to this country's complex and struggling economy.

Families also are trying to plan for college, and students are contemplating their options. Education researchers are pondering how to get them to assess the raw dollar values of various college choices, a difficult task in an often emotional conversation about a young person's future. The numbers sometimes can be surprising. College Measures issued a report last month on schools in Colorado, finding that students with two-year associates degrees in science are earning almost $7,000 more per year than students who earned bachelor's degrees in the same area.

It also doesn't help that federal financial aid systems are a bear to navigate, even though the benefits can be quite generous.

What exactly is financial literacy? Is it about personal interest rates or the gross domestic product? What should educators be focusing on when teaching about it? How can financial literacy be assessed? Is it important, or even appropriate, to look at the expected return-on-investment when examining college choices? What are some basic misunderstandings about finances and the economy? How much money is lost because of those misunderstandings?